PCI is still retains a discount although. Narrower than in the past.
Separate question: Do folks regard PONDX/PIMX/PONAX as a core holding or a high yieldly satellite? Just curious what folks like @junkster, @davidsnowball, @mikem, @oldskeet think?
Regards,Mike

Mike I can't help you because of the short term nature of my methodology. I was in PONDX in 2012 and a few months in early 2013 but not again until this year. Its returns from 2013 through 2016 were not inspiring. Much of this year's returns are from its exposure to rmbs primarily non agency. I read somewhere PIMCO and Ivascyn are buying all the legacy non agency rmbs from before the crash they can get their hands on. I am 55% IOFIX and 45% DPFNX now which is primarily all non agency but with a heck of a lot less AUM. How long this ultra steady rise in that market can continue there I have not a clue. But the strong housing market has helped immensely.

"If you're "nearly 100%" equities"
@JoJo26: That's not what he said. Read it again: "nearly 100% of my investments in equities". Obviously he does not consider his cash to be "invested"... a perfectly reasonable perspective.

But then the performance of your "investments" is not an accurate representation or apples to apples comparison to how it stacks up versus broader index performance... If you have cash that you'd actually deem as investible, then it should be a part of your portfolio, and be a boon in down markets and drag in up markets.

To understand how speculative stock investing really is, I always find it instructive to look at the par value of a company when it's issuing shares of stock. This is for Facebook in 2014 when it was going to list some shares:
https://sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680114000059/prospectussupplementwhatsa.htm
Class A Common Stock, $0.000006 par value
Amount to be Registered
162,698,114
Maximum
Offering Price
Per Share
$75.19
The par value of a stock is basically nil because unlike a bond it has no par value. Nothing whatsoever is legally promised to investors. The whole stock market is built on a hope and a prayer, and on relative valuations to bonds that can disappear like vapor the moment a company misses an earnings estimate. To me bond investing is far more rational. You know exactly what you're legally promised via covenants before you invest. You just have to analyze the balance sheet and think about where interest rates are heading. That's it.
Stocks by contrast are mysterious. "Mysterious" could be a euphemism for much more malevolent terms to describe how the market functions. How did the issuers of Facebook come up with a $75 maximum offering price when the par value is nil? I imagine they got together and plugged in various models and projections and price-per-click calculations to speculate that it should top off at $75. Is that what it was worth then? Is this what the stock market is worth in total today? Anyone who says they have a definitive answer is lying.

It sounds simple to buy during a bear market, but the facts are that people buy during the bull market, and will sell during and after a decline. I heard that a guy by the name of Robert Prechter has an amazing history, so he says, of predicting the stock market collapses.

A June 2015 profile of Robert Prechter, the world’s foremost proponent of Elliott Wave technical analysis, turned out to be the most popular investing story on MarketWatch for the week in which it was published.
One of the reasons is that, at the time, Prechter said the bull market in U.S. stocks was in a “precarious position” as a “mania” gripped investors, who pushed stocks to sky-high levels of overvaluation. The market has only risen since then, and it even got a bump from the November 2016 election of businessman Donald Trump as president.

The Depression is just around the corner

Prechter has the distinction of being bearish since late 1987. His fame came from some prescient bullish calls in the mid 80s. Since then he has been among the most vociferous bears on the planet.
True story and I am NOT referencing Prechter here. I once spoke at a seminar. One of the other speakers was a well known perennial bear. He told me in private that he actually was never as bearish as his public persona just that doom and gloom sold more subscriptions.

"If you're "nearly 100%" equities"
@JoJo26: That's not what he said. Read it again: "nearly 100% of my investments in equities". Obviously he does not consider his cash to be "invested"... a perfectly reasonable perspective.

As someone in their mid-40s with nearly 100% of my investments in equities, now that it's no longer needed for parental care purposes, I will happily deploy my large cash pile to opportunistically pick up stocks I want to own or add to as they "go on sale." But since I'm already comfortably in the markets, I'm in no rush and won't just pay any price!

If you're "nearly 100%" equities, how do you have a large cash pile.....

At this point I think the 10 year returns are probably more relevant as it has gone through 08, 09 dip. I dont think the next three years will be like the past three :)

FYI:
Regards,
Ted
https://www.cnbc.com/video/2017/08/02/cashin-divergence-between-dow-and-dow-transports-worrisome-for-traders.html?play=1

Hi again @Tony and others,
I edited my first comment of August 1st with an additional comment note. With this, I am bringing this thread back to the top of the stack. Any thoughts and or additional comments would be welcome?
Skeet

Apparently Barron's (the source of the scorecard table) is offering its article free, via google:
https://www.google.com/search?q=Barrons+rating+robo+advisors&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8
The article with the table is "Rating the Robo Advisors" (first non-ad link in search).
There's a companion piece as well: Which Robo is Best for Your Portfolio?
Unfortunately the table (with only 1 year and YTD data) is undated, so we don't know what timeframes the data represent. The Barron's article does cite the ultimate source of the data - Backend Benchmarking. You can get the full report there for free, but you have to register (I haven't done this, at least yet):
https://theroboreport.com/
There's an informative graphic in the Barron's article that shows the asset allocations of three of the test portfolios (Vanguard, Betterment, and Schwab). That image seems not to be firewalled:
http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/ON-CF390_Cov3Po_16U_20170728221049.jpg
The companion piece points out that there's more to deciding among systems than raw performance. It notes, for example, that Schwab is achieving its performance by relying on EM bonds ("not exactly a risk-free strategy"). More generally, it observes a "general bias toward value investing and a significant exposure to international markets."
Finally, from the table I see that TradeKing was acquired by Ally. I missed that completely when it happened last year:
https://media.ally.com/2016-04-05-Ally-Financial-Announces-Acquisition-of-TradeKing-Group

FYI: Growth investing has been great for American shareholders over the past three years.
While the best-performing U.S. equity mutual funds between 2014 and 2017 fall into several different market capitalization categories, almost all of them are tilted towards or were designed to capture growth stocks.
The S&P 500 returned about 10 percent annually over the past three years, posting a year-to-date total return of 11.67 percent. All of the funds on our list beat that benchmark.
According to Morningstar data, these mutual funds had the best three-year performance as of Monday were:
Regards,
Ted
http://www.fa-mag.com/news/these-11-mutual-funds-have-had-the-best-3-year-returns-33946.html?print

FYI: A Robo Score Card:
Regards,
Ted
http://ritholtz.com/2017/08/rating-robo-advisors/

As someone in their mid-40s with nearly 100% of my investments in equities, now that it's no longer needed for parental care purposes, I will happily deploy my large cash pile to opportunistically pick up stocks I want to own or add to as they "go on sale." But since I'm already comfortably in the markets, I'm in no rush and won't just pay any price!

@Tony No doubt about it Tony, at some point the bull market will end. From today's Josh Brown article, that I will link later, nobody knows when. However, as indicated by the linked chart Blue line below – that’s the whole world ex-US breaking out into new ground. What else do you need to see to understand that a global breakout has occurred? It’s happening right before your eyes, month after month. Even Tyler sees it: “The MSCI World index had its 8th monthly rise in a row, its best run since 2003 and the fourth-longest monthly winning run on record”
Regards,
Ted
MSCI World Index & S&P 500 Chart:
http://ep60qmdjq8-flywheel.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/acwi.png

A bit less commentary and rather more profiles this month.
I think the liquidity storm argument, which we've discussed here and which Ed mentions, is pretty interesting. Here's the gist of it: there are now ETFs which are themselves much more liquid than the stuff they invest in is.

Imagine an ETF that owns an apartment building and turnovers over all its shares every two days with a very small bid/ask spread. That's great until redemption orders greatly exceed purchase orders, at which point the question becomes, "who can I sell my apartment building to, at face value, by 4:00 p.m. today, in the face of a panic?"
That's an extreme illustration but the same dynamic is true for high yield bond ETFs. Those bonds don't actually trade all that other or all that smoothly. But the ETF does.

The traditional answer is: there are buyers with cash, waiting to swoop in. You might take a haircut, but you'll find a buyer. Mr. Rodriquez's argument is that the supply of buyers is becoming smaller (as assets flow into passive strategies that are always 100% invested) and less liquid (managers fear the drag of cash, so they don't hold it).
Optimists say there are plenty of active managers around, no worries! The tricky question is not whether there are any buyers, but how many buyers need to be present in order for the market to function? If I'm interested in buying a particular microcap but see no one else bidding (or if the bidders can absorb a small fraction of the offered supply), why wouldn't I wait and let it tumble?
He argues that such little hiccups might turn into major train wrecks if they trigger quant funds, including some highly-leveraged private funds, into initiating additional sales to fulfill stop-loss orders.
I haven't written anything myself about the argument, at least in our monthly issue, because I'm not confident that I know how much liquidity is available. One table in the 2016 ICI Factbook says that total cash in mutual fund portfolios is at its second-highest level ever. I have trouble taking that at face value since it seems inconsistent with the other trends we can document: fewer active managers, fewer absolute value/high cash stash funds, more reluctance to hold cash.
---
Three quick profiles:
Evermore Global Value, which strikes me as being pretty much the epitome of what you hire an active manager to do. Mr. Marcus looks at investments in a fundamentally different way than does 99% of his peers, which leads to very, very different investments and results. There's a hint of activism to his approach: he not only identifies firms that have turnaround potential, but he also selectively supports the turnaround.
Moerus Worldwide Value, which takes a very different approach to valuing stocks than most. It manifests Marty Whitman's "safe and (ridiculously) cheap" mantra without, we're hoping, the sort of uber-concentration mistake that the octogenarian made. In speaking with Mr. Wadhwaney, I did get the sense that the team is structurally committed to managing risk at the portfolio level as well as the individual security level.
Shelton International Select Equity, which adopted the (broken) shell of WHV International Equity in 2016. The managers seem to have a distinctive approach (focusing on the lifecycle stages firms go through rather than their market cap, industry or whatever) that's worked well in private accounts for a decade. Whether you're impressed with their performance so far depends a lot on whether you look at when they took WHV over (February 2016) or when they completed the transition from the legacy portfolio to their own (July 2016). This latter feature is, of course, just an Elevator Talk. That is, a short feature designed to introduce both me and you to the strategy. Some E.T. funds eventually warrant full profiles, many don't. We'll see.
----
Finally, Charles is offering the opportunity for folks with MFO Premium access (or folks interested in seeking it) to meet with him on the web (August 16 or 23) or in person (at Morningstar ETF) to figure out how to get the most from the system.
For what all of that is worth,
David

"... buy and hold seems to work well right up until a bear market arrives."
http://stockcharts.com/articles/dancing/2017/08/what-will-you-do-when-the-bear-arrives.html

As a side note, the various classes are also affected:
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/354046/000035404617000011/agbl_sup.htm

September of '17

Correction, as of 9/29/2017

If the fund is closing to new investors as of 9/17, why do both Schwab and Fidelity show it as closed at this time? I wouldn't mind beginning a small position and add to at better valuations.